Review

The Story of a Marriage

By Andrew Sean Greer

Published by Faber

This is a gorgeous, thoughtful, surprising novel – an intense, interior narrative that gradually and unhurriedly reveals its potentially cataclysmic secrets.

In 1953 San Francisco a strange man turns up on housewife Pearlie Cook’s doorstep, and throws her entire life into chaos. It’s difficult to say more about the plot than this without giving away too much, for the novel’s narrative depends on a couple of key twists. ‘Twist’, though, isn’t quite the right word, for even guessed in advance it isn’t really possible to spoil their impact.

Holland Cook belongs to a long literary line of beautiful, inscrutable characters who find that love and desire follow them wherever they go, no matter how they behave. Along with beauty, he shares a certain blankness with Fitzgerald’s Daisy (though none of her privilege) and also something of the quality of Brick in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – that of being the vessel into which everybody else pours their hopes and dreams. Because of his beauty, and his unknowability, and something else, more powerful than charisma, that these characters have that can never quite be named but only felt, he’s the prize in the competition that is everyone else’s life.

His awareness of this, though, seems minimal at best. By contrast, awareness is what his wife, Pearlie, has in abundance. The novel’s narrator, it’s her job to be acutely conscious of everything that happens around her – initially in order to protect her husband, who she also views as deeply vulnerable (for reasons that are both true and false). Her vigilance serves both her character and the storyline, for the relative peace of her carefully maintained existence is shattered early on in the novel, and from that point on the plot’s advancement depends on how much knowledge she is able to absorb.

Fortunately for the reader, it’s a good deal, but also fortunately, it’s absorbed at a measured pace. Pearlie understands things quickly; but she’s also a woman who has built a life that she is unwilling to throw away. Her sharp intuition and generous empathy clash with her instinct to protect and keep what she loves – a conflict that lasts the course of the novel and keeps some truths at bay almost until the close.

Yet The Story of a Marriage isn’t just about the facts Pearlie is forced to face, about the parts of her husband’s history of which she knows nothing. Once certain details come to light, it’s easy to assume that the novel will follow one course – and another book might have done so. But there are so many ways to be wrong about the people we love, as Pearlie comes to realise, and (as the title itself implies) we can take a lifetime to truly get to know them.

Reviewed by Rosa Anderson, Booktrust Literature and Promotions Officer

---